Trade Associations

Small and mid-size trade associations don’t always have the money and lobbying power to push their agendas forward the way large associations do. That doesn’t mean you can’t have political impact. The Hudson Collective team has helped numerous clients mobilize their membership to achieve powerful political impacts.

There are ways to rally your membership around a cause, ballot issue, or legislation that supports or benefits your organization. The first step is to include your members in the debate, discussion and decision making around the issue. Not all members feel the same way about the things that affect your organization. Making them feel involved from the beginning makes them more likely to act on it, even if the decision isn’t one they would have made on their own.

The key to expanding your political impact is connecting with your members’ families and communities. Reaching out to spouses, extended family, co-workers and friends gets your message to people who are outside your profession, association or voting district extends your political reach. This creates a bigger pool of people who can vote your way or lobby their congressional representative, pushing your agenda in places your membership alone cannot reach. We have experience facilitating these kinds of connections for organizations, developing the right messaging and strategies to achieve your association’s desired results.

Trade associations work every day to maintain their relevance and preeminence as the authoritative resource for their industry – and drive membership growth and retention.

Trade association marketing and advertising is never easy, and for most trade associations the competitive landscape has never looked more crowded. Not only are there more organizations chasing new members, but there are also more for-profit companies offering competing services. As a result, whether you are with a trade association whose members include large corporations, or a membership association with thousands of individuals enjoying your services and offerings, it takes a strong brand strategy and a sophisticated outreach plan to efficiently and effectively continue to attract new members and retain existing members, and to drive attendees to your conferences and events.

Our solutions include a multi-tiered, integrated approach that combines online digital media campaigns, fresh and compelling themes and creative, and a separate set of campaigns for the branded products themselves, all tied together through new messaging with the simple measurable goal of increasing brand awareness and engagement with the association.

The bottom line is, associations can no longer rely on traditional tactics to acquire and retain members – they need to get into the content game and start producing fresh, relevant content to drive traffic and engagement. This is not a simple task- it takes a disciplined approach that regularly creates and distributes new insights, ideas, and information, packages them in a concise and compelling way that attracts attention, and communicates the value that the content delivers to its members. And to truly be effective, that content must also be search engine optimized to make it easy to find, and properly coded with relevant keywords in key areas of the site that Google catalogs. When done properly, a dashboard can be set up to track, measure and optimize engagement and conversion of the content marketing program.

With organizations of all sizes jumping into the content game – it is absolutely critical that you begin a smart content marketing strategy to re-capture and retain your membership base and reclaim your stake as the dominant voice of your industry.